Who's Idioblaptic?

Though allergists have blamed everything under the sun--cat dander, mothers-in-law and even the sun itself--for a host of more or less real diseases, they have usually conceded that there had to be definite symptoms such as runny nose, asthma or hives before allergy could be proved. Last week, having exhausted the known world in their search for allergenic villains, 500 dedicated specialists from 22 nations finished their meeting in Florence's Palazzo Pitti with new inspiration: ten times as common as conventional allergy, and far more treacherous, may be a hidden type called idioblapsis.

This encouragement to find allergy where none was suspected before came from Manhattan's aged (81) Allergist Arthur Fernandez Coca. Sometime medical director of Lederle laboratories, Dr. Coca did not begin to treat patients until he was 65, soon found that many who had puzzling sensitivities did not react with the usual wheal to scratch tests with any of the common causes of allergy. To explain this, he postulated that the patients must have a concealed reaction marked by quickening of the heartbeat. He called this supposed condition idioblapsis (literally, self-produced harm), sought to confirm it by noting rises in the pulse rates of patients after eating certain foods.

Other researchers have never confirmed Dr. Coca's results, and U.S. medical men generally dismiss his theory. But the world's allergists in Florence were impressed. Nonsmokers felt a quickening of their own pulses when they heard that one of the commonest causes of idioblapsis is tobacco, with one patient's pulse reported jumping from a rate of 46 to 94 within three minutes of lighting a cigarette. Still more provocative was the case of a man whose pulse went from 68 to 104 after he merely held a cold, empty pipe in his mouth for two minutes. Proponents of idioblapsis believe that it may be the direct precursor of heart attacks or even cancer. Happy with what they called a "revolutionary, all-important theory," allergists scattered from Florence to their home cities, vowing to seek proof of it in their patients' pulses.

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